Archeological evidence from the time before magic left Gryst is difficult to trace. Fossil records suggest the land became fallow sometime before the rise of the Borean Empire, whose mandate of assimilation has left us with precious few traces of the civilizations that preceded it. Surviving Borean records rarely mention Gryst except to write it off as a wasteland or, in the more interesting cases, as something akin to a “cancer” or a “poison.” The most comprehensive writings from the Borean period come from small homesteading communities that formed in the deserts where Borea had little influence, but the sophisticated agricultural techniques they developed and documented don’t tell us much about the specific nature of mana-drained earth that cannot be observed–

  Genevieve's reading was interrupted by the sound of the library door opening. She’d learned to be wary of the Prince’s comings and goings, so she looked up from her book to see his preferred automaton servant, the spindly one in the maid dress, holding the door open while he stepped inside. “I knew I would find you here,” he said. “You’re a studious one. Not the worst quirk, but you could stand to pick up a few more interesting hobbies, fiancée.”

  Genevieve smoothed out the creases of her skirt with one hand, and placed her open book carefully upon her lap. “I’m simply trying to pass the time. Reading does that better than most other things.”

  “Yes, I understand. With our automated staff running the house there’s precious little for you to do.” The way he looked Genevieve over made her deeply uncomfortable. It was a constant tribulation, forcing herself not to cringe under his gaze. “Not to worry. You won’t have to languish like this for too much longer. Keeping my promise has been painful for me, but once our wedding is over I intend to keep you very busy.”

  The implication–or more accurately, the threat–was clear. But Genevieve wasn’t going to rise to his provocation. She'd had enough time by now to figure out the dynamic. The more she protested, the more he upset her, the more he enjoyed it.

  She wanted to believe her father would not have bargained her off if he knew what she was being consigned to. Though in the end what he would have done mattered less than what he did. Still, she was hardly the first noble girl to be used as a political token. Cornelius fancied her powerless, but she was still royalty. Once she had the chance to ingratiate herself to the powers-that-be in Gryst, she'd have access to the levers. Enough at least to protect herself. Until then she had to endure.

  "You will just have to be patient a while longer," she said with careful neutrality.

  “There is good news about that, though.” Cornelius sat in a reading chair by the door, faced at just a slight angle from Genevieve’s. He crossed his legs and cocked his head to look at her. “I’ve spoken with my father about our wedding arrangements. He’s agreed to let us hold a public ceremony here, at the summer palace, before we meet him in Caliden for the big soirée with all the neighboring nobles.”

  “I see.” Genevieve tried not to give away her uncertainty. What does he want from this? “I have to admit, that seems like an unusual arrangement.”

  "It’s unorthodox, yes, I’ll admit. But I was very insistent on it. I thought it would be the best thing for us as husband and wife."

  “And why is that?” Genevieve felt herself sinking back into her chair.

  “Because it means we’ll get to have the ceremony early. Before we have to worry about all those other nobles and their little politics getting in the way.” Cornelius leaned his chin against his fist and smirked. “Even if it’s just for a few months, I’ll get to have you all to myself. No balls, no galas, no pesky obligations. There won’t be anything to get in between you… and me.” He turned around and looked at her directly. Or more accurately, he ogled. “And that’s just the way I want it to be.”

  Genevieve’s expression must have betrayed how she really felt, because Cornelius grinned in triumph. "There's the face I was looking for." He laughed, like he thought she should be in on the joke, too. "You don't have to be so stoic, pet. I know you can barely handle the anticipation."

  There wasn’t any point trying to keep the mask on. Genevieve balled her fists and trembled. “You’re a cretin, Cornelius. I don’t even care how much satisfaction you’ll get from hearing it.”

  Cornelius chuckled and rose smoothly from his seat. “You’re fun, girl.” He approached Genevieve, calm and slow on his feet. “When I learned my father chose to marry me off to a young lady, I worried you would be some delicate, preening little thing. That you’d snap like a twig before I even had to try to break you.” He reached his hand out towards Genevieve’s face. She jerked away, repulsed, but he just took his hand back and wiggled his fingers tauntingly. Not just yet. “But once I met you, I knew we were going to have fun. That’s why I needed to make sure we’d have plenty of time.”

  Genevieve scowled at him, but before she could get out a word of protest his hand shot down to her lap and his finger hooked itself under the book she’d been absorbed in just a few short minutes ago. “What are you reading, anyway?” he asked, lifting it up. “The Barren Pulse: A Historical Excavation of Gryst’s Missing Mana.” He didn’t even give her a second to answer. Not that she was going to. “You’re still hung up on that?”

  “I don’t understand how you’re not.” Genevieve snatched the book back. She realized she was huffing angrily, and she took a moment to calm herself. Not because she wasn’t still trembling with fear and anger, but because she hated giving Cornelius what he wanted. “It’s never even occurred to you that the kingdom would be better off if people could grow crops in their own soil?”

  “Tch.” Cornelius looked away from her, apparently less amused to see her thinking about something that wasn’t him. “The kingdom gets by fine. The peasants manage what they need to. And it’s not my problem if they don’t. Besides, our automatons are far more impressive than your dirt-encrusted country conjurations.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Genevieve knew better than to get drawn into the argument, but she was too worn down to resist. “What do your automatons offer that’s more valuable than food, Cornelius?”

  “How about eternal life?”

  That was bullshit. But something about it made Genevieve’s hairs stand on end. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll show you.” Cornelius gestured to his servant, standing silent and forgotten by the door to the library. “Come here.”

  The automaton did as it was told. It was a smaller, more delicate model than some of the other ones Genevieve had seen, clearly fine-tuned for precise household tasks. For some reason Cornelius always put it in a maidservant’s uniform, with a thin black dress and white lace apron beneath the narrow, femininely curved helmet that served as its head. Watching it move made Genevieve vaguely uncomfortable, the way it seemed at times to almost mimic the motion of life, only to reveal its artificiality every time it put down its foot and stood lifelessly still, like a statue, while it determined the trajectory of its next step. There was a function, apparently, which forced the machine to check for any potential collisions before it moved. Genevieve didn’t understand how that was supposed to be better than a person with their own eyes.

  When the automaton reached Cornelius’s side and stopped, standing upright next to him, he moved behind it and quickly removed its apron and dress. There was nothing lascivious about the machine’s bare, featureless metal torso, but somehow Cornelius’s fingers pulling at the fabric made Genevieve feel she was seeing something she shouldn’t. The lifeless automaton had no way to protest Cornelius baring it and putting it on display. Genevieve wanted to speak up for it, but anything she said would have sounded absurd.

  Once the machine was undressed Cornelius tossed the uniform aside and left it in a pile on the chair he’d been sitting in. “She was my nursemaid when I was a child,” he said, and he banged his fist against the metal plate that formed the automaton’s shoulder. “A very kind woman. Gentle and nurturing and attentive. In some ways she was more my mother than my mother. Maybe in most ways.” His hand touched the machine’s metal helm lightly, almost affectionately. Genevieve felt a hideous abyss opening before her. Without thinking she snapped the book on her lap shut, tensing herself to bolt at any moment. “As a servant, she was truly invaluable. She made the palace a home. That’s why it was so important to keep her around, so my children and their children and every generation after them can be cared for just like I was.”

  “Th…” Genevieve had to gulp down a breath before she could speak. Her stomach turned over itself, a thick, heavy, knotted pit weighing her whole body down. “Cornelius. That’s a machine.”

  “Not just.” He had never spoken like this before. With something akin to reverence. He placed his hand on the robot’s side, slipping his fingers into a seam in its plates and pulling at some kind of latch. The front of the chassis loosened, and he swung it open.

  Inside the machine was an elaborate geometric latticework, small and delicate shapes placed in precise, regular positions whose meaning and purpose Genevieve could not begin to guess. The shapes formed a mazelike network of hard edges and right angles that wound around the automaton’s chest cavity, connected to each other by soft, pulsing white lines that ran their way all through the pieces of the machine, forming a mad web that connected it all to the inevitable, inescapable center. A large, cylindrical shape mounted at the very back of the hollow, protruding out to reach almost two-thirds of the way to the front.

  Mounted in the center of that cylinder was a shape. An object, semi-opaque with a dull, milky white color, whose uneven and jagged edges, like a natural gemstone roughly hewn straight from the rock, were a stark and unnerving contrast to the hard, exact geometry of everything else inside the machine. While the lines inside the machine pulsed regularly, evenly, at a predictable, continuous rate, the stone in the center flickered at random like a sputtering flame, short periods of inactivity interspersed between rapid bursts of an eerie green light that made Genevieve feel queasy deep in her stomach. Something about it felt almost familiar, but that did not comfort her. It terrified her.

  An awful, dark tingle ran through her body, from her heart through to the barest tips of her fingers. And then she heard the voice.

  “Cornelius…?”

  A faint whisper. So quiet she almost missed it, over the endless idle whirring of the automaton itself. But not so quiet she could convince herself it was only in her head.

  “Cornelius. Are you there?”

  The whisper rose just a little louder. Loud enough that Genevieve could hear the voice tremble. The green light flickered gently as it spoke. And even though the machine stood perfectly still, Genevieve could swear it was quaking in fear.

  “Of course I’m here,” Cornelius said. He put his arm on the machine’s shoulder and the light flickered again, as if in panic. “Don’t be shy, Lissa, say hello to my fiancée.”

  “Lissa.”

  The voice repeated that name. The flickering light inside the open chest cavity shone brighter, filling up the stone it was trapped inside with a desperate intensity.

  “Lissa. Lissa. I.”

  The machine began to shake and then spasm. Its arms reached inwards like it wanted to grab onto itself, but then they jerked back as though pulled violently by some unseen force. They swung back and forth while the rest of the body shook and quaked, almost like the components inside were trying to vibrate their way out of the armor they were trapped in.

  “Where am I? Cornelius? Cornelius? Who are you? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  Cornelius scowled and grabbed onto the open plate of the chassis.

  “Cornelius. Cornelius. I can’t stay here. Don’t keep me. I need to go. I need to go ho”

  The door slammed shut with a clang and the machine stopped immediately. It stood there perfectly still for a long moment, and then began to slowly adjust itself. First the legs righted themselves, returning to attention. Then the chest shifted until it was perfectly upright and straight. Finally, the arms returned obediently to the side, and the machine once again stood statue-like and still.

  “Well,” Cornelius muttered. “She’s never done that before.” He looked to Genevieve and shrugged. “But it’s nothing to worry about. You hardly need to open them up like that anyway.” He took a few steps away from the machine and sat in another chair, facing Genevieve. “Regardless, I’m sure you get the point by now. Our most capable servants get to be preserved, in deathless bodies that will never age or wear in any way you can’t fix with a few new parts and a set of armor.” He ran his hand over the automaton’s chest, and Genevieve truly believed she saw it shudder. “They perform every duty asked of them without question. And no matter how many times you crack them, shatter them, rip off their arms or crush their legs, they always go right back together. That’s why dear Lissa is the best serving girl we’ve ever had. And she will be forever. Do you see?”

  Genevieve saw. She saw the picture Cornelius was drawing, frozen in absolute, chilling clarity.

  She rose to her feet in a daze and muttered something to excuse herself. The book fell off of her lap and she didn’t care. She left the library and stumbled to the nearest washroom to vomit.